June 3, 2025
The Center was thrilled to welcome acclaimed author Susan Choi (Trust Exercise) to celebrate the highly anticipated release of her new book, Flashlight.
Flashlight traces the disappearance of Serk, a Korean-born man raised in Japan, through the perspectives and memories of his disaster-struck family. The novel reveals the ripple effect of catastrophe and war across time, and the ways in which the past is always present.
Choi was joined in conversation by novelist Sarah Thankam Mathews, author of All This Could Be Different, a finalist for the National Book Award.
Featured Book
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Flashlight
By Susan Choi
Published by Farrar Straus & Giroux
One night, Louisa and her father take a walk on the beach. He’s carrying a flashlight. He cannot swim. Later Louisa is found washed up by the tide, barely alive. Her father is gone. She is ten years old.
In chapters that shift from one member to the next, turning back again and again to that night by the sea, Susan Choi’s Flashlight chases the shockwaves of one family’s catastrophe. Louisa is an only child of parents who have severed themselves from the past. Her father, Serk, an ethnic Korean born and raised in Japan, lost touch with his family when they bought into the promises of postwar Pyongyang and relocated to the DPRK. Her American mother, Anne, is estranged from her family after a reckless adventure in her youth. And then there is Tobias, Anne’s illegitimate son, whose reappearance in their lives will have astonishing consequences.
What really happened to Louisa’s father? Why did he take Louisa and her mother to Japan just before he disappeared? And how can we love, or make sense of our lives, when there’s so much we can’t see?
Featuring
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Susan Choi
Susan Choi
Susan Choi is the author of Trust Exercise, which received the National Book Award for fiction, as well as the novels The Foreign Student, American Woman, A Person of Interest, and My Education. She is a recipient of the Asian-American Literary Award for fiction, the PEN/W. G. Sebald Award, a Lambda Literary award, the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. She teaches in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Photo Credit: Paul Myers
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Sarah Thankam Mathews
Sarah Thankam Mathews
Sarah Thankam Mathews is the author of the critically acclaimed novel All This Could Be Different, which was shortlisted for the 2022 National Book Award in Fiction, the Discover Prize, and the Aspen Literary Words Prize. It was also a New York Times Editor’s Choice and named a Best Book of the Year by outlets including NPR, Vogue, New York Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, and TIME magazine. Mathews founded the mutual aid network Bed-Stuy Strong and writes the newsletter thot pudding.
Photo Credit: Dondre Stuetley
